Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/LONDON: UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been facing mounting pressure to ban government officials from using TikTok, a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, line with moves by the European Union and United States to counter growing cybersecurity threats from China.
Officials in the US and Europe have been said to limit the use of the Chinese-owned social app over concerns that data can be accessed by Beijing.
European Commission decided this week to suspend the use of TikTok on devices issued to staff and personal phones if they have official apps installed, following Washington’s ban the previous year on federal workers using the app on work devices.
Ban on TikTok
Rishi recently resisted pressure to bar the parliamentary staff and MPs from using TikTok, which has become popular among UK politicians.
A spokesperson for 10 Downing Street said he was “unaware of any ban on 10 Downing Street staff from using the app.
He said, “the [No 10] has got a TikTok app account, but I do not think we’ve put anything on it for a little while now,”. “It’s for the individual departments and also ministers to choose which social media they want to use.”
The Conservative MP Luke Evans posted a 48-second video on the Tik Tok app, showing his 41,000-strong followers what it is like going through security to get into No 10.
Alicia Kearns, chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, said, “We have now seen both the EU and the US take decisive action on TikTok app over security concerns: the acquisition of our data by a hostile state. We risk becoming a tech security laggard amongst free and open nations.
“The UK government needs to reconsider its policies and move to ban government officials and also parliamentary staff from installing the TikTok app on any mobile phones utilized for work.
We need the informed discussion across our UK, including with our children, about the significant of our information and all it can reveal about us, and how it can make us vulnerable.”
